Giving Refuge: Reflections on Working with Asylum Seekers

Abstract

Ten years ago, a psychiatrist colleague asked me to see Annie, a young Cameroonian woman who was seeking asylum in the United States, because a medical examination would be helpful to support the applicant’s case. Annie was not easy to interview. She spoke in a whisper, made little eye contact, and sat in an attitude of fear, with her shoulders hunched and knees drawn in. When she was 20 years old, she was arrested and abused in prison, and the story she told me was chilling: For two weeks, she suffered daily beatings, food deprivation, and multiple sexual assaults before a sympathetic soldier helped her to escape. The soldier told her that if she were rearrested, she would be killed. Annie was not involved in politics and had no strong convictions to sustain her during her ordeal. She never knew for certain why she had been arrested but suspected that it was because of her boyfriend’s political activities. After her escape, relatives helped her to flee, and she arrived in the United States and requested asylum. At the time I met her, she was living with strangers, sheltered by a local church. Several computer crashes later, I cannot find the evaluation I wrote on her behalf, but I remember that thin, frightened, young woman and how terribly alone she felt. Like others I would later meet, she suffered hourly reminders of her